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Installed but wont boot on Dell R210 II Bare Metal

DerekBaxter

Have tried installing a few times and always get "no boot device available" after reboot of install. 

No errors during the install. Completes successfully.

Confirmed its writing SOMETHING to the drive as I have formated it with ext4, reinstalled and gone back to check it with gparted and it shows the entire disk as unallocated.

Are there any logs I can look at during the install?

I have tried an MBR repair but it is saying no partitions are on the drive.



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  • 0

    I had the same issue on my R210 II.  The issue appears to have something to do with the SAS disk or the controller.  It's just a boot, the device works fine once booted.

    I used the workaround in this thread to get it booting.  The short version: use Easy2boot to create a USB boot drive.  You configure the boot drive to boot from the hard drive by default.  That drive provides a bootloader, then boots XG from the hard drive like it normally would.  You have to hang a usb drive off the server, but it works perfectly once you get it setup.

    Steps I used:

    • Install XG on the hard drive as usual
    • Create the boot drive by the instructions on the Easy2boot site
    • Config the R210 BIOS to boot from USB (remove all other options as the R210 gets flakey with USB boot sometimes)
    • Boot the USB and modify the options to boot the hard drive by default after a timeout
      • Don't mess with manually editing files as explained on the Easy2boot web site, the site layout and docs are pretty rough.  You can do everything needed in the menus after it's booted.
    • Boot and configure XG normally
  • 0 in reply to JD MaC

    Thank you for that workaround.  Do we know when Sophos will add support for the R210 II?  

  • 0 in reply to JasonTorrey

    Hi. Does the latest XG 17 release allow installation and proper boot up on a Dell R210II server w/o need for this workaround?

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  • 0 in reply to JasonTorrey

    Hi Jason.  I just wanted to follow up on this thread.  I can confirm that the latest installer of XG as of today (Dec 06, 2017) still has the "no boot device" issue after installation on some hardware.  I have two separate machines on which both Sophos UTM and pfSense install and run fine.  Sophos XG, however, shows the installation as successful, but then won't boot.  Like others in many other forum posts have already mentioned, after installing XG on a hard drive and then attaching that hard drive to another machine with a different OS (such as Windows or Linux) and using various disk management tools (Gparted, Linux fdisk, Windows Disk Manager or diskpart utility, etc) to examine the XG disk, they all show the recently installed Sophos XG disk as has having no partitions at all.  It's quite frustrating. 

     

    Additionally, I have no idea what the XG installer is doing when it partitions the drives, as there is no logging output I can find for the XG installer.  Most Unix-based installers like this have another console window you can bring up (such as when pressing alt-F2, etc) that shows a live log output of the install process.  XG doesn't offer this, unfortunately, so we are in the dark as to just *what* it's doing.

  • 0 in reply to jreiter

    Further update:  To start from a clean slate, I booted the machine into DBAN and gave the hard drive a quick wipe to make sure it was completely free of any residual strangeness.  I then used Gparted to put an MBR partition table on the disk, and formatted it as FAT32 with the "boot" flag set.  This means it's now an officially bootable, MBR, fat32 partition.  Pretty basic stuff.  I then did the XG install, which reported that it completed successfully.  Upon reboot, no boot device.  Examining the disk with Gparted and other tools again shows the disk as having no partitions at all.  Very strange.  I was hoping to try out XG, but I'll probably have to go back to UTM or pfSense, since those work fine on these machines.

     

    Side note:  It looks like the XG installer does a full format for each partition (initializing every sector) rather than a quick format like everything else does.  This means installing it on, say, a 500 gig hard drive (which is what my machines happen to use) takes a very long time.  This is made doubly strange by the fact that it is sitting there doing long, drawn out formats for each partition is creates, only to find no partitions on the drive afterward.

  • 0 in reply to jreiter

    Hi. Has Sophos resolved this issue with supporting the Dell PowerEdge R210 II?  

  • 0 in reply to jreiter

    Hi,

    any security device worths its name or money will do a full format of all disks. The UTM does as well, that is why you only assign about 120gb or so for a home system.

    For systems that do not install on bare metal I use VM and then do an install. It is not a Sophos issue to fix the install on 3rd  party hardware but a user issue. Sophos does not guarantee installation on any hardware other than its own

    Ian

  • 0 in reply to rfcat_vk

    I'm running into the same issue with a Dell R210 II that I purchased so I'm looking at the easy2boot solution.  When I tried to install the app on my workstation to create the usb key, Sophos Home antivirus did not like easy2boot.  Is this safe to use or is it opening up a backdoor to my  Sophos XG Firewall? 

     

     

     

    Chris